(1955- ) US author and academic, a professor at the University of Connecticut since 1989, also resident in the UK. His first sf story, the orthodox "What Makes a Cage? Jamie Knows" (in Protostars, anth 1971, ed David Gerrold), significantly fails to prefigure his mature works, the best of which appear in The Secret Life of Houses (coll 1988; exp vt Dream of the Wolf1990; further exp vt Greetings From Earth: New and Collected Stories1993), where they apply the torque of Fabulation to Southern Californian venues whose haunted, dehydrated inmates are trapped just short of the healing waters of the Pacific Rim. His first novel, The History of Luminous Motion (1989), trawls in the same suburban deserts, though without the use of sf protocols, as does What's Wrong with America (1994), comically. In his later work he has concentrated on Beast Fable tales [see TheEncyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], including the remarkable Animal Planet (1995) (see Zoo) and the stories assembled in Hot Animal Love: Tales of Modern Romance (coll 2005); some of these tales are Equipoisal with sf readings, but without ever becoming "arguable" narratives of mutated American life and mores. He wrote the entries on Magic Realism and Oulipo in the second edition of this encyclopedia. [JC]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →